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Monday, 11 March 2013

‘Climate of Freedom’ Tour

In just under three weeks from now, Christopher Monckton will begin traveling the country to knock over the many manufactured myths of the warmist “consensus.” His method: identifying errors by the climate mainstream that, he says, always and invariably fall in the direction of “undue alarmism and flagrant exaggeration.”

has been taken in, hook, line and sinker, by catastrophic anthropogenic climate alarm [and would] continue to inflict crippling taxes and regulations in the name of saving the planet from 'global warming.'

One isn’t supposed to say these things.

Nor is one supposed to point out in plain English, as he did in two Open Letters to John Key (Letter One, Letter Two), what our Prime Minister’s ridiculous ’50 by 50’ policy on “emissions reduction” means ….

This means that within 41 years - the working lifetime of a high-school graduate today - the policies which you propose to introduce will have shut down, deliberately, consciously, and to no environmental benefit whatsoever, more than one-half of the entire New Zealand economy. You propose to throw your nation back in the direction of the Stone Age - electricity one day a week if that, automobiles replaced by horses and carts, elevators replaced by stairs, all aircraft grounded, the conquest of space abandoned, factories silent, several hundred thousand jobs destroyed and transferred to China, the machine-press and combine-harvester replaced by the hammer and sickle.

… and, again, on the plain meaning of the the Emissions Tax Scam by which the Prime Minister hopes to bring this about:

your proposal to command the reshaping of the economy from the centre has no merit, not merely because there is no scientific or economic need for it, but because, even if there were, it cannot and will not work. By any definition, emissions trading is not really trade – it’s rationing. The government puts a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide industry is allowed to emit (a “cap”). and then unused quotas can be sold. It is certainly not a market operation because the key feature is not the buying and selling but the government limit. This is not a cap-and-trade system: it is more accurately called a “cap-in-hand” system; the important feature of the system is that productive people have to go cap-in-hand to people who have never done a day’s work in their lives to ask for permission to be productive. The truly bizarre part is that these finger-wagging clipboard-wielding people who have never raised a cow, laid a brick, or drilled for gas – who have done nothing except get in the way of those who have – still expect society to provide them with food and a warm house. Presumably by magic… We can no longer afford the luxury of over-extended, over-ambitious, centralized government. The call for “action” in the face of climate change is overwhelmingly for government action to place limits on private action. Since this will of necessity concentrate vast additional powers in the hands of government it is not merely doomed to ignominious failure; it is not merely guaranteed to increase your nation's "carbon footprint" under the guise of taking steps to reduce it; it is an explicit and abject abandonment of the individual freedom for which the National party is supposed to stand.